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Sunday, September 1, 2019

Another great hymn from the great St. Thomas Aquinas. This version of the hymn does not include the 3rd or 4th verses. The art is "The temptation of St. Thomas Aquinas" by Diego Velazquez; "Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas over the heretics" by Filippino Lippi; "The Apotheosis of Thomas Aquinas" by Francisco de Zurbaran. The Latin lyrics and English translation:
Adoro te devote, latens Deitas,
Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas;
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit,
Quia te contemplans totum deficit.
Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur,
Sed auditu solo tuto creditur.
Credo quidquid dixit Dei Filius;
Nil hoc verbo veritátis verius.
O memoriale mortis Domini!
Panis vivus, vitam præstans homini!
Præsta meæ menti de te vívere,
Et te illi semper dulce sapere.
Pie Pelicane, Jesu Domine,
Me immundum munda tuo sanguine:
Cujus una stilla salvum facere
Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere.
Jesu, quem velatum nunc aspicio,
Oro, fiat illud quod tam sitio:
Ut te revelata cernens facie,
Visu sim beátus tuæ gloriæ. Amen
I devoutly adore you, O hidden God,
Truly hidden beneath these appearances.
My whole heart submits to you,
And in contemplating you,
It surrenders itself completely.
Sight, touch, taste are all deceived
In their judgment of you,
But hearing suffices firmly to believe.
I believe all that the Son of God has spoken;
There is nothing truer than this word of truth.
O memorial of our Lord's death!
Living bread that gives life to man,
Grant my soul to live on you,
And always to savor your sweetness.
Lord Jesus, Good Pelican,
wash me clean with your blood,
One drop of which can free
the entire world of all its sins.
Jesus, whom now I see hidden,
I ask you to fulfill what I so desire:
That on seeing you face to face,
I may be happy in seeing your glory. Amen

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

This is the 2019 Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. It's long, but wow what a show! With amazing musicians, projections on the castle and fireworks, it is a spectacular event. Plus, there is nothing more beautiful than bagpipes when properly played!
Please note, during the fireworks, you will hear the song twice. We wanted to add a close-up of the fireworks.
General Timestamps
It opens with General Fanfare
2:40 The Massed Pipes and Drums
10:50 The Guard's Brigade Band, Nigeria
12:41 German Army Kassel Band
16:09 Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force Steel Orchestra
19:27 The French Artillery Band Lyon
24:46 Massed Pipes and Drums
27:50 Lochiel Marching Drill Team
32:44 Beijing Marching Wind Band and Cultural Display
37:46 Tattoo Dance Company
41:03 Hjaltibonhoga - The Sheltland Fiddlers
43:37 New Zealand Army Band
48:32 The Massed UK Military Bands
All bands come onto the esplanade for the final
1:07:15 Repeat close-up of the fireworks
1:11:02 Lone Piper
1:12:03 The March Off

“He knows nothing — not morals, not theology, not history. Nothing. Only power interests him.”

Last Saturday, I arrived in chilly Buenos Aires. I am sure it is just a coincidence, but my arrival coincided with the collapse of the peso. A dollar goes a long way in Argentina. For $40, Americans can get a four-star hotel; for $4, they can get a tasty steak. Signs of Argentinian economic malaise abound, from shanty towns on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to hobos sleeping on dirty mattresses in its downtown. Argentines love raw dollars, offering huge deals for cash purchases.

It appears that the Peronistas are on the verge of victory. As Brazil goes right, Argentina moves back to the left, such is its addiction to its socialist traditions.

My principal purpose in visiting Buenos Aires is to learn about its not-so-favorite son, Jorge Bergoglio, who still hasn’t visited Argentina since becoming Pope Francis. During my first few days here, I asked every Catholic I met to explain that anomaly. I got some blunt and brutal answers.

“We all know he is a son of a bitch,” said a former prosecutor to me. “We are ashamed of him. He represents our worst qualities.”

His friend chipped in that Catholics consider Francis “to be a fake, a make-believe pope,” not to mention, he added, an uncultured, ill-mannered flake.

The former prosecutor oozed contempt for Francis: “He knows nothing — not morals, not theology, not history. Nothing. Only power interests him.”

The description of Pope Francis as a power-mad ideologue is very widespread, I am finding. I spoke at length with Antonio Caponnetto, who is the Argentine author of several books on Pope Francis. “At seminary, his classmates called him ‘Machiavelli,’ ” he noted.

Caponnetto gives two reasons for why the pope has avoided his home country: one, at least half the country hates him, and two, Francis dislikes the supposedly “conservative,” pro-capitalist Macri regime. The latter reason is absurd: Macri is hardly conservative, as Argentine conservatives are the first to say.

On Wednesday morning, I visited with Santiago Estrada, Argentina’s former ambassador to the Holy See. He has been close to Bergoglio for decades, but he allowed that Bergoglio “hates businessmen.” He dislikes Macri, he said, not because Macri is a pillar of conservatism but because Macri is simply not as anti-business “as the pope.” Estrada was loath to criticize his friend, but he conceded that the pope’s promotion of molesting bishops has been “inexplicable.”

The pope’s predecessors visited their home countries. Even the timid Pope Benedict XVI braved his German critics and returned home.

Is it really possible Pope Francis could boycott Argentina for the rest of his tenure?

Probably not. For one thing, say engaged Catholics, if the hardcore leftists return to power, “he will come back.” Estrada thinks he “definitely will come back next year” if Macri loses, but that he will call it a “pastoral visit.”

“Francis has been working behind the scenes” to help Macri’s opponent, an Argentine political operative said to me. “He wants Macri to lose.”

Conservatives fear the prospect of a Peronista victory. One, who has a political blog, said to me, “I will leave the country. It won’t be safe for us.”

I got a small taste of that on Tuesday as I passed the office for one of Argentina’s left-wing parties. No sooner had I taken out my camera to take some pictures of it than a couple of Peronista wannabe thugs sprinted out of the office to question me. What, they demanded, are you doing? I ignored their gibbering, while another member of my party tried to appease them with a cleverly composed piece of faux flattery.

One eye-rolling conservative Catholic told me that the Peronism of Francisworld is so strong that some acolytes of the pope are talking about canonizing Evita.

Monday, August 12, 2019

Judy was the mascot of several ships in the Pacific. She was captured by the Japanese in 1942 and taken to a prison camp. There she met Leading Aircraftman Frank Williams who shared his small portion of rice with her. Judy raised morale in the POW camp giving alarm when poisonous snakes, crocodiles and even tigers approached. She was smuggled out in a rice sack when the prisoners were shipped back to Singapore. She never whimpered or betrayed her presence to the guards. The next day, the ship was torpedoed. Williams pushed Judy out of a porthole in an attempt to save her life, even though there was a 15 feet drop to the sea. He made his own escape from the ship, not knowing if Judy had survived. Frank Williams was recaptured and was sent to a new POW camp without news of Judy's survival. However, stories began being told of a dog helping drowning men reach pieces of debris on which to hold. Williams was giving up hope of finding Judy when she arrived in his new camp. "I couldn’t believe my eyes. As I entered the camp, a scraggy dog hit me square between the shoulders and knocked me over! I’d never been so glad to see the old girl." They spent a year in Sumatra. "She saved my life in so many ways. The greatest way of all was giving me a reason to live. All I had to do was look at her and into those weary, bloodshot eyes and I would ask myself: What would happen to her if I died? I had to keep going." Even if it meant waiting for a miracle.

Once hostilities ceased, Judy was smuggled aboard a troopship heading to Liverpool. In England, she was awarded the Dickin Medal, "the animals Victoria Cross", in May 1946. Her citation reads: "For magnificent courage and endurance in Japanese prison camps, which helped to maintain morale among her fellow prisoners and also for saving many lives through her intelligence and watchfulness". At the same time, Frank Williams was awarded the PDSA's White Cross of St. Giles, the highest award possible, for his devotion to Judy. Frank and Judy spent the year after the war visiting the relatives of English POWs who hadn't survived. Frank remarked that Judy always seemed to give a comforting presence. Judy died at the age of 13. Frank spent two months building a granite and marble memorial in her memory, which included a plaque which told of her life story.

Friday, August 9, 2019

Last month we celebrated the Feast of the Sacred Heart, beloved of Catholic devotional iconography (and traditional kitsch holy pictures). If the core of the Christian faith is the love of Christ, this Feast is a visible and liturgical reminder of it. In Around the Year with the Von Trapp Family (Sophia Institute Press), its author, Maria Augusta von Trapp (aka actress Julie Andrews) devotes a loving passage to this Feast, writing “As our home is called “Cor Unum” and our motto for daily life that we want to be one heart and one soul, we chose the feast of the Sacred Heart as our family feast.”

My reference to Julie Andrews is not entirely frivolous, just a reminder that almost all people who have watched that enormously popular film The Sound of Music, will have learnt what little they know of the von Trapp family from it. What they won’t learn is the deep-rooted Catholic faith and culture that lay behind the winning combination of romance, motherless children, a new governess, music and political danger that made up the essential features of the film itself.

That the film has become embedded in the western psyche is obvious from the way it crops up from time to time in the media: former MP Ed Balls has taken his family to Salzburg on the von Trapp tourist trail; TV investigator Sue Perkins has made the inevitable TV programme, critical of the matriarch behind the family’s fame; even that arch-feminist Germaine Greer is on record as crying while watching it. But this beautifully produced and illustrated book goes much deeper.

Divided into two parts, Celebrating with the Family in Heaven, containing vivid and affectionate reminiscences of pre-War liturgical celebration in Austria, and Celebrating with the Family on Earth, which is all about how the von Trapp family celebrated the Sacraments and kept a firm hold on family customs such as reading aloud, singing, dancing and home concerts, the book would make an excellent addition to a Catholic family book shelf – not least today when the milieu surrounding the faith has almost entirely disappeared, leaving families marooned on a small island of religious belief, surrounded by the vast, secular (and often hostile) cultural mainland.

In her introduction, Maria Augusta writes that “When Hitler’s troops invaded our homeland, Austria, in 1938, my husband and I felt bound in conscience to save our children from yielding to the religion and philosophy of this neo-paganism.” She continues, “When we finally reached the hospitable shores of [America], we arrived in New York City, the fourteen of us possessing a total of four dollars. Most of us knew no English and we had no relatives or friends on this vast continent. We were real refugees and we were poor.”

The many thousands of dispossessed peoples and refugees tramping the roads to new countries today will identify with this. With their combined musical gifts and the energy and entrepreneurship of the indefatigable matriarch, Maria Augusta (Captain von Trapp sensibly bowed to his wife’s superior capacity to keep the family afloat), the family eventually became the famous Trapp Family Singers of post-war America.

This book reminds us that underpinning their worldly success was their Catholic faith. For instance, writing about All Souls’ Day, the author emphasises that “in the old country, the great event of the day used to be the visit to the cemetery”. Describing in detail the Austrian cemeteries of her memory, she adds, “When the father of our family died…we started our own old-world cemetery.”

In a thoughtful chapter, The Land without a Sunday”, Maria Augusta relates how Austrian friends made a trip to Communist Russia before the War and how what shocked them more than anything else and which “seemed to be the root of all the evil” was the way the traditional Christian Sunday had been abolished in favour of constant shift-work, with factories open every day of the week in “an atmosphere of constant rush and drive.” She follows this with a long, affectionate description of “a typical Sunday in Austria…up to the year before the Second World War.”

If this sounds an exercise in nostalgia; it isn’t. It is a vivid reminder of how ancient European Christian traditions have been lost (helped by the indifference of the EU) in the ensuing decades, and of the importance of the culture surrounding faith. This culture is wide, rich, life-enhancing and humane: Maria Augusta includes songs and rounds for family singing – and of course many appetising recipes for family meals, such as lebkuchen, stollen, sacher torte and simnel cake.

This website is dedicated to a renewal of Christian culture. It is inspired by Sir Winston Churchill, a valiant defender of Christian civilization, who believed "we have a great treasure to guard; that the inheritance in our possession represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries." With Churchill, we believe that a "fraternal association" of the English-speaking peoples must "for their own safety and for the good of all walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace.”